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Fall 2004 Expanded Undergraduate Course Descriptions

See the faculty page for contact information | Note: Descriptions subject to change.

4: Critical Inquiry and Literature (Kella Svetich)
This lower-division seminar will examine three Asian American novels and other short works to explore gender in literary representations of colonization. We will discuss issues of race ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationalism to assess how colonialism constructs gender roles and dynamics, thus impacting realities for Asian/Asian American men and women. Specific topics will include (but are not limited to) war, rape, the sex industry, cultural tourism.

Grading
Two papers, one short presentation, occasional reading responses, class participation.

Texts
Dream Jungle, Jessica Hagedorn
Comfort Woman, Nora Okja Keller
The Book of Salt, Monique Truong
Selections from writers including Leslie Bow, Ania Loomba, Trinh Minh-ha, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak

30B Survey of American Literature (Kevin Attell)
This course is an introductory survey of American literature from the end of the Civil War to the present. Over the course of the term we will read a wide range of works that represent the tremendous productivity and diversity of American literature of this period. Close attention will be paid to the formal and aesthetic aspects of individual works and literary movements as well as to the historical and cultural contexts out of which they arise. Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week.

Grading
Two 5-6 page papers (25% each), a midterm (20%), a final exam (25%), participation in discussion section (5%).

Texts
The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Package 2: vols. C,D,E), Nina Baym
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

42: Approaches to Reading (Desiree Martin)
This course is designed as an introduction to the various methods that might enable us to become more aware of the different historical, sociopolitical, philosophical, and personal contexts that invest our acts of reading. We will consider a variety of traditional and contemporary approaches to reading literature. The primary goal of the course is to refine students' skills as interpreters of literary texts by developing a working knowledge of these critical methods. There will be frequent writing assignments.

Grading
(Tentative) Three essays (60% total), Midterm exam (10%), Final exam (15%), Class participation (15%).
Texts
Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 2nd Ed.
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Bertolt Brecht
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Course Reader

43: Introduction to the Study of Drama (Frances Dolan)
Organized around two very recent plays that will be performed on campus this fall--Twilight Los Angeles and The Laramie Project - this course will explore how the drama participates in processes of social change. Students will learn about some of the precedents for socially engaged drama in ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and eighteenth-century England. We will also discuss different models for the relationship between the drama and cultural change. Throughout the quarter, we will be especially interested in how the drama addresses war, violence, political turmoil, disease, gender, and sexuality. In what ways is the drama uniquely suited to scrutinizing problems and raising questions? How do dramatic kinds, such as comedy and tragedy, differ as resources for the exploration of conflict? Students will learn to read closely and support their own textual interpretations, to visualize plays as they read them, and to imagine the possibilities created through performance.

Grading
Based on three papers (45%); periodic quizzes (10%); a midterm (15%); a final exam (20%); and participation in class and sections (10%).

Texts
Lysistrata, Aristophanes
Medea, Euripides
Richard II, Shakespeare
The Beggar's Opera, John Gay
Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw
Twilight Los Angeles, Anna Deveare Smith
The Laramie Project, Moises Kaufman
Angels in America, Tony Kushner

45: Introduction to the Study of Poetry (Sandra McPherson)
With the aim of learning to read poetry closely and pleasurably, we will study the impulse to write metric forms, free verse, figures of speech, sensory image, tone, diction, politics and poetry, self-portraits and personae, ballads, sonnets, blues, psalms, and one complete collection by a contemporary author in order to comprehend voice and individual poetics.

Grading
Four short papers and a final, all of equal weight.

Texts
The Rattle Bag, Seamus & Heaney and Ted Hughes, editors Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, second edition, J.D. McClatchy, editor
The Homeplace, Marilyn Nelson
How to Be This Man (anthology of men's poems), Swan Scythe Press
A Reader, to be obtained from Navin's Copy Shop

46A: Masterpieces of English Literature (to 1640) (Margaret Ferguson)
In this course, we will read and discuss selected late medieval and early modern works of literature in order to increase students' skills in close-reading and in intertextual analysis, which involves tracing the ways in which later writers build on (and play with) earlier writers' work. Texts will include parts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (especially the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale and the Tale of Sir Thopas); a brief selection from Langland's Piers Plowman; parts of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which are particularly indebted to Chaucer's and Langland's writing; and finally, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in which a fool plays the part of "Sir Topas."

Grading
Quizzes, two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Texts
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare, ed. Crewe
Course reader, available at Navin's Copy Shop

46B Masterpieces of English Literature (1640-1832) (Alessa Johns)
We will read widely in the Norton Anthology, beginning with John Milton's Paradise Lost and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, moving on to works by Swift, Pope, and other significant 18th-century authors, and concluding with Romantic poetry and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As we explore the considerable variety of literary forms and conventions in the period, we will pay close attention to their social and cultural contexts, looking at related art forms and discussing topics such as slavery, science, travel, gender, poverty, and revolution.

Grading
Based on quizzes, 20%; papers, 40%; a midterm, 20%; and a final, 20%.

Texts
Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, seventh edition Frankenstein, Shelley, ed. Macdonald and Scherf

100F: Creative Writing: Fiction (Clarence Major)
This discussion course in the writing of fiction will encompass the development and evaluation of written materials and conferences with individual students. Admission is by permission of instructor.

Grading
TBA

Texts
TBA

100P: Creative Writing: Poetry (Sandra McPherson)
We will enjoy weekly experiments emphasizing different aspects of the art of poetry, using models from two poets' collections, mostly poems of Western America. We will emphasize fresh language, intense rhythm, metaphorical association, recovering memory, immersion in culture, observation of nature, formal experimentation, and employment of all the senses.

Grading
Based upon a notebook containing your poems written for class and especially your revisions of them. Participation also counts.

Texts
May Out West, May Swenson Mountains and Rivers Without End, Gary Snyder

106 English Grammar (Kathleen Ward)
This course deals with the grammatical structure of the English language, focusing on the major syntactical structures of sentences. We will use modern language analysis techniques and the premise that it is necessary to understand how sentences are put together in order to be able to diagnose the problems sentences may have. This has obvious implications for editing, for writing, and for writing instruction, but a knowledge of language structure can also enhance an appreciation of literature. After this course, you should be able to explain to yourself and to others what is wrong with a questionable sentence and what can be done to improve the sentence. In addition to writers and editors, people who would like to teach English or language arts in the public schools are the natural audience of this course. It is an irony of teacher training that English teachers are trained primarily in literature, but, in professional practice, they spend most of their time dealing with their students' language problems.

Grading
Seven homework assignments (5% each = 35%); one midterm (30%); one final exam (35%).

Text
English Syntax: From Word to Discourse, Lynn M. Berk
Analyzing Sentencing: An Introduction to English Syntax, Nowel-Burton Roberts

Optional
The Bedford Handbook, Diana Hacker

110A: Introduction to Principles of Criticism (David Alvarez)

113A Chaucer: Troilus and the "Minor" Poems Claire Waters
This course will offer an introduction to Chaucer's writing before the Canterbury Tales, including his masterpiece, the tragic love story of Troilus and Criseyde, which will provide the central focus of the course. Students will gain familiarity with Middle English through a reading of some of Chaucer's short lyrics before moving on to such works as the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Troilus, and the Legend of Good Women. We will explore the medieval world's fascination with the heroic and classical past, including the legend of Troy, and Chaucer's efforts to develop a literary English that would give his own poetry a place in that tradition, as well as enable him to depict the endlessly fascinating central figures of Troilus and Criseyde.

Grading
Based on translation and reading quizzes, 20%; two short papers, 15% each, totaling 30%; a midterm, 20%; and a final exam, 30%.

Texts
The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson Optional: A Chaucer Glossary, Norman Davis, et al

115 Renaissance Literature (Raymond Waddington)
The course will examine the use of dialogue in several genres - fictive prose, drama, and poetry - with a focus on assessments of the court and the church, the sources of authority and power. Beginning with three influential Italian authors (Castiglione, Aretino, Machiavelli), it will proceed to five major English writers: More, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert.

Grading
TBA

Texts
The Book of the Courtier, Baldesar Castiglione
Cortigiana, Pietro Aretino
Mandragola, Machiavelli
Utopia, Thomas More
Henry IV, Part I, Shakespeare
Volpone, Ben Jonson
George Herbert, George Herbert
The Complete English Poems, John Donne

117B Shakespeare: The Middle Period (Andrew Majeske)
This course will focus on Shakespeare's plays generally believed to have been composed in the period 1599-1604. These plays thus span the politically charged period that includes the end of Queen Elizabeth's long reign, and the beginning of the reign of her cousin, James I. We will study several plays traditionally grouped with the comedies, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. We will also study one of the "problem plays," Troilus and Cressida", as well as one of the major tragedies, Othello.

Grading
Based on quizzes, two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Texts
The following paperback editions of the plays have been ordered from the campus bookstore. If you own or would like to buy a complete edition of Shakespeare's works (e.g. the Riverside or Norton editions), you may also use that book for the course. Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida (ed. Bevington, Bantam Books)
As You Like It, ed Mowat, Folger Library
The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed Mowat, Folger Library
Twelfth Night, ed Mowat, Folger Library
Othello, ed Mowat, Folger Library

117C Shakespeare: The Later Works (Elizabeth Deitchman)

Not only were Shakespeare's plays written to be performed but performance also appears as a central theme running through much of Shakespeare's dramatic work; in As You Like It, for example, Jaques observes "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players" (2.7.139-40), and in Hamlet the prince relies upon a play to "catch the conscience of a king" (2.2.601).  In this course we will study five of Shakespeare's later plays taking performance as our general theme.  Together we will both examine these plays as scripts to be performed and explore how each play foregrounds performance.  In the course of our explorations, students will learn how to perform close readings of individual plays and inter-textual examinations of their thematic intersections.  At the quarter's end, students will also participate in their own performances based on one of the five plays we study.

Grading
Based on one short paper (15%), one longer paper (20%), a group performance project (20%), a midterm exam (15%), a final exam (20%), and periodic quizzes (10%).

Texts
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest

138 British Literature 1945 to the Present (Greg Miller)
This course covers British literature from 1945 to the present. We will begin with Post-World War II malaise and reactions to Modernism and then proceed more or less chronologically, covering poetry, plays, short fiction and, in the last few weeks, some recent British novels. Our focus will be on (1) tensions between tradition and experimentation and (2) displacement; we will remain mindful of the literature's formal characteristics and social relevance. A course reader includes writers not represented in the list below (such as Angela Carter) as well as statements on aesthetics by Larkin, Heaney and others.

Grading
Short essay (20%), longer essay (30%), midterm (20%) and final (30%).

Texts
Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, Volume Two only (contemporary)
Endgame, Samuel Beckett
Company, Samuel Beckett
Translations, Brian Friel
Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald
The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi
By the Lake (a.k.a. That They May Face the Rising Sun), John McGahern
Course reader, available at Navin's

143 19th-Century American Literature to the Civil War (Joanne Diehl)
This course considers several major writers of the period that has come to be known as the American Renaissance. Issues that emerge from this tradition include an abiding concern with the relationship between human interactions and spiritual quest, the pivotal role of nature in determining the self's understanding of her/his purpose in the world, slavery, evolving gender roles, and the exploration of the conflictual yet mutually dependent dynamic between the individual and her/his social milieu. We will focus upon these issues within the literary contexts in which they appear. Readings include Emerson's essays; selections from Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Thoreau's Walden; Poe's short stories and poems; Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; Melville's Benito Cereno; Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and selected poems of Whitman and Dickinson.

Grading
One essay (30%); a midterm (30%); and a final, form yet to be determined (40%).

Texts
TBA

149: Topics in Literature After Osborne: Pinter, Orton, Stoppard (Raymond Waddington)
Fulfills British Literature Victorian or 20th-Century Requirement.
In the mid-1950s, John Osborne's plays seemed to signal a revolution in British theater. Actually, they represented the end of one tradition, just as a paradigm shift was occurring to another, heralded by the English translation of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The course will examine the impact of absurdism and existentialism on the early plays of Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, and Tom Stoppard.

Grading
TBA

Texts
Look Back in Anger, Osborne
Complete Works: One, Pinter
The Complete Plays, Orton
Waiting for Godot, Beckett
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard
Jumpers, Stoppard
Travesties, Stoppard

155A 18th-Century British Novel (David Simpson)
The novel took on many of its modern forms in the course of the 18th century. Adventure stories, erotic romances, moral tales and examinations of the fictionality of fiction itself all abound in the British publishing world. We will study a selection of representative novels by Defoe, Richardson, Haywood, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne with an eye to their formal characteristics and their historical significance.

Grading
Two papers, a midterm, and a final. The first paper and the midterm will each carry 20% of the grade, the second paper and the final will each be worth 30%.

Texts
Robinson Crusoe, Defoe
Pamela, Richardson
Love in Excess, Haywood
Joseph Andrews, Fielding
Humphry Clinker, Smollett
Tristram Shandy, Sterne

159 Topics in the Novel: The Novel as Narrative of Moral Discovery: 1860-1960 (Peter Dale)
Fulfills British literature Victorian or 20th century requirement. The contemporary moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes that, "The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned, or dissipated into distractions; and the human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest." But a quest for what? First and foremost, MacIntyre maintains, for "a conception of the good which will enable us to order other goods..." This course treats the (British) novel written in the century between roughly 1860 and 1960 as a quest for the moral good in social contexts which have ceased to give clear guidance to what that good should be. The quest is often "frustrated" and, in some cases even abandoned, but it is, arguably, the core project of the classical novel. We examine this project in three different novelistic "pairings": Charles Dickens and George Eliot in the mid-19th century; Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century; and Iris Murdoch and V.S. Naipaul in the 1960s.

Grading
Two papers and a final exam, each counts for one-third of the grade.

Texts
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The Mimic Men, V.S. Naipaul
A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch

161A Film History I: Origins to 1945 (David Laderman)
This course is the first half of a two-quarter overview of the cultural and aesthetic history of filmmaking. (English 161B, "Film History II: 1945 to the Present," will be offered Winter Quarter 2005; the courses may be taken separately and need not be taken in sequence.) Our loosely chronological survey will begin in the 1890s with the invention of cinema and end this quarter with the film response to World War II.. We will look into the ways that the less regulated early silent film experimented with narrative methods and social subjects later forbidden. Hollywood's evolving dramatic rules and comic styles will be contrasted with alternatives arising in the 1920s from German expressionism, French surrealism, and Soviet montage theory and, after the development of sound film, from political debates over the Depression of the 1930s, especially within the Japanese and French film industries. Along the way, we will also explore the invention of gender roles onscreen and the early cinematic representations of nationality, ethnicity, and race, as influenced by Hollywood's Production Codes and other censorship practices. During the six class hours each week, we will see at least one full-length film and a number of excerpted sequences.

Grading
Two papers (40%), two quizzes (30%), and a final (30%).

Text
Film History (second edition, 2002), Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell

165 Topics in Poetry Other Traditions: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Very Strange People in Modern Poetry (Joshua Clover)
Fulfills American Literature Post-1865 Requirement
This course, which will focus mainly on 20th century American poetry, will look at poets working outside their times' main traditions: boundary-pushers, rule-breakers, losers, experimentalists, wanderers, and folks who just didn't care what the big cheeses were doing. The goal is to introduce students to writers and traditions they might not previously have encountered, in search of new thoughts, structures, sensations - with the warning the unfamiliar is often uncomfortable, challenging, and always seems less user-friendly and polished than the familiar and popular. By the end of the quarter, we should all have learned how better to read and fall inside of new and intense territories.

Grading
Absolutely regular attendance is mandatory; anything more than two absences will affect one's grade. There will be regular reading notes, two writing projects, and a final exam. Some of this writing may be creative rather than critical/analytic, at least in part. One day/week will be given over to discussion: classroom participation is expected.
Breakdown

177 001 Study of an Individual Author: Daniel Defoe (Alessa Johns)
This course will look at the life and writings of one of the most prolific authors in the English language, Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe ranks among the best-known books in world literature. He came from a modest background and a persecuted religious minority, but he lived in extraordinary times and responded with amazing energy and creativity in his roles as a tradesman, a bankrupt, a journalist, a spy, a political propagandist, a moralist, a projector, and an inventor of the novel. His writings encompass everything "from angels to annuities and from adultery to agriculture," as one commentator has put it. We will look closely at three of Defoe's novels, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana, and A Journal of the Plague Year, evaluating them in the context of his other works on politics, spirituality, trade, the supernatural, economics, conduct, and travel. In the process, we will not only become acquainted with the literary genius of an influential and controversial author, but we will also gain an incomparable view of British society in the early 18th century.

Grading
Based on quizzes (20%), two papers (40%), a midterm (20%), and a final exam (20%).

Texts
Robinson Crusoe, Defoe
Complete English Tradesman, Defoe
A General History of Pyrates, Defoe
Roxana, Defoe
A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe
Course Reader to include such works as Religious Courtship, Conjugal Lewdness, The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd, The Political History of the Devil, The True-Born Englishman, Jure Divino, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, An Essay Upon Projects, A Tour Thro' the World Island of Great Britain, and the Review.

177 002 Study of an Individual Author: Virginia Woolf (Patricia Moran)
This class will trace the development of the modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, beginning with her earliest novel - the aptly titled The Voyage Out - and ending with Between the Acts, the novel she had very nearly completed at her death. In addition to reading most of her major fictions, we will read a selection of her best-known essays and her unfinished autobiographical portrait A Sketch of the Past. We will consider Woolf as a theorist and practitioner of modernist narrative form, as a woman writer deeply interested in questions of female creativity, and as someone increasingly relevant to contemporary discussions of trauma and memory. We will also look at how Woolf has come to be something of a cult figure in recent years by considering her work in relation to The Hours (both the book and the film) and the movie, Mrs. Dalloway.

Grading
Two essays, one, 4 to 6 pages (15%), the second, 8 to 10 pages (25%); midterm (20%); final (30%); quizzes, discussion questions, journals, etc. (10%).

Texts
The Voyage Out
Mrs.Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
A Room of One's Own
The Waves Between the Acts
Three Guineas
Moments of Being

180 Children's Literature (John Stenzel)

This iteration of Children's Literature will begin with some of the earliest folktales and conclude with Harry Potter.  Readings in classic texts for and about children from the 19th and early 20th Century will provide historical grounding for understanding pervasive plot lines, recurring themes, and archetypical characters in later works.  Rounding out this idiosyncratic survey, students will be expected to pursue particular interests of their own, assembling an annotated bibliography along with an analytical essay as a major project; possible topics will include (but are not limited to) contemporary "realistic" teen fiction, juvenile science fiction / fantasy, literature of particular racial/ ethnic/ gender interest, satirical works, etc.  Lectures will include readings-aloud and slide presentations, and exams will cover this material - so regular, punctual attendance is essential; students will also document their active reading in a formal journal that will periodically be reviewed and commented upon.

Grading:  Midterm (20%); Reading journal (25%); Bibliography/Essay (25%); Final (30%)

Texts
Partial reaidng list (in an anthology, individual books, and a reader):
Selections from Grimm, Andersen & others;

Little Women, Treasure Island, The Wind in the Willows, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Stuart Little, Call of the Wild, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

181B African American Literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Clarence Major)
This course will offer the student a chance to develop an appreciation for and an understanding of the full artistic and cultural range of 20th-century African American literature with themes ranging from birth to death.

Grading Class participation (10%), midterm (20%), term paper (40%), final essay (30%).

Texts
Cane, Toomer
Sula, Morrison
Invisible Man, Ellison
Course Reader

187 Literature and Other Arts Literature and Painting in the American West (Alan Williamson)
We will be studying, and to some degree comparing, writers and painters from the West, chiefly California and New Mexico. We will emphasize the tension between the desire to celebrate, and the impulse to fear, the vastness and newness of the Western landscape, and we will consider whether there are parallels between the problems posed for visual and for verbal representation. Writers to be studied include Cather, Jeffers, Steinbeck, Silko, Snyder; painters include Bierstadt, Hill, Keith, Piazzoni, O'Keeffe, Thiebaud.

Grading
One short paper; one long paper.

Texts
TBA

188 001 Special Topics in Literary Studies British Fiction at the Turn of the 20th Century (Peter Dale)
We examine some of the principal social, moral, and artistic concerns of British fiction published in the last 15 years.

Grading
Students will give in-class oral presentations and submit a final seminar paper of 12 to 15 pages.

Texts
Brick Lane, Monica Ali
A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt
The Peppered Moth, M. Drabble
When We Were Orphans, K. Ishiguro
Enduring Love, I. McEwan
After Hannibal, B. Unsworth

188 002 Plath & Hughes: Mythologizing Marriage Sandra Gilbert

188 003 Reading Other Worlds: Postcolonial Theory & Fiction Bishnu Ghosh
While the era of European colonialism seems past, the master narratives of colonialism are repeatedly staged in popular culture (from Disney films to The Mummy blockbusters). Indeed, as Edward Said noted in his ground-breaking Orientalism (1978), colonial world-making persists because it has "passed into general culture." We will examine a variety of popular colonial and neocolonial artifacts - magazines, photographs, comic books, short fiction, movies, animated films, young adult fiction, blockbusters, and television shows - to analyze the forms in which colonial stories continue into our contemporary culture. In such pursuit, we will interrogate the category of the "popular" in its relation to official, critical, counter-, and dominant culture. Students are expected to come prepared to discuss readings in class, and to view two films (Stephen Sommers' The Mummy, 1991, and Hector Babenco's At Play in the Fields of the Lord, 1991) outside of class time (screenings TBA); other visual texts (such as a Star Trek: the Next Generation episode and excerpts from Disney's Tarzan) will be shown in class.

Grading
One joint presentation (25%); One short response paper (20%); One research paper (40%); Class participation (15%).

Texts
Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Tintin in the Congo, Herge
Folder of critical essays, photographs, and fiction

189 001 Seminar in a Major Writer: Emily Dickinson (Joanne Diehl)
This course offers an introduction to the poems of Emily Dickinson. Emphasis will be placed on interpretation of individual texts informed by an analysis of the distinctive characteristics that govern Dickinson's style and themes. Through a reading of selected letters, an exploration of her cultural milieu, and an investigation into the historical influences of her time, we will contextualize the writing of a poet most often noted in the popular imagination for her isolation. In addition, we will familiarize ourselves with Dickinson's biography and the scriptural conditions of her manuscripts (a crucial issue given the fact that only a handful of Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime).

Grading
Students will be required to write a brief explication of a poem, keep a literary journal for a span of seven days in which they will respond to their developing understanding of selected Dickinson texts, and write a final, sustained essay.

Texts
Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. R.W. Franklin

July 27, 2004 Descriptions subject to change